Moths with a nose for learning

Researchers conditioned a moth to extend its proboscis in anticipation of a dollop of sucrose after being given a scent cue to study how the insect learned. Understanding how associations are built between stimuli and behavior can offer significant insights into how to build artificial systems to discriminate odors. Credit: I. Ito and R.C.Y. Ong, NIH Much like Pavlov conditioned his dog to salivate in anticipation of food when a bell rang, insects can be trained to perform certain behaviors when enticed with different smells. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered that when training insects, the interval between the signal, or odor, and the reward—delicious sugar water—is everything. They also found that this process of building odor-sucrose associations would involve a mechanism that allows integration of neural activities (mental representations) that are not nearly coincident. Understanding how associations are built between stimuli and behavior gives insight into the nature of learning. Their findings were published online in Nature Neuroscience.

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